CLEVELAND — The Cleveland Cavaliers cruised to an easy 115-101 win over a shorthanded Philadelphia 76ers team.
“The beauty of it is we got another one tomorrow,” is how James Harden ended his media scrum after Sunday’s disappointing loss to the Boston Celtics. The Cavs didn’t make up for that performance, but this was a good response.
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Like Sunday, the Cavs started the game unable to buy a three-point shot. They made just one of their first 10 attempts, but this time, they didn’t bury themselves in the process. They found ways to still get to the basket and the free-throw line. Instead of a 10-point quarter, they mustered 26.
And when they actually started hitting their outside shots in the second quarter, they broke the game wide open.
The Cavs don’t have many tough opponents left on their schedule; they do, however, need to figure out who’s in their rotation for the playoffs. That’s what a game like this was for.
“I told the guys in there, this is going to be a fight to be in the playoff rotation,” head coach Kenny Atkinson said postgame. “We got so many good players. We’re deep. Who’s going to be a star in his role?”
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Role players not coming through against Boston is one of the things that did them in. Keon Ellis was one of the players who struggled. He didn’t score in 24 minutes and finished the game with a plus/minus of -15.
Ellis responded well on Monday, scoring 19 points on 5-9 shoooting which included going 4-7 from three. He showed that he can make an impact offensively, which is what he’ll need to continue doing if he’s going to get substantial playoff minutes.
The three-point shot is going to be the swing skill for Ellis. If he’s making that, they can always find room for him on the court. But there are other ways he can influence the game on that end.
“We’re just discovering his offensive capabilities,” Atkinson said. “I saw a couple of things that I haven’t seen him do yet. Come off a DHO (dribble-hand-off), get in the lane, shoot the flooter. I didn’t even know he had that.”
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Harden scored his 29,000th career point. That’s a remarkable accomplishment, even though less than 0.1% of his points have come in a Cavalier uniform. It speaks to his incredible longevity and how he’s been able to continually reinvent his game in a league that has evolved drastically since he entered it 17 years ago.
“[It’s a ] testament to his resiliency,” Atkinson said. “It’s so hard in this league to do it for so long, so consistently. This version we’re seeing of James…[is a] complete player and playmaker. And what he’s given us so far is everything we need to win.”
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A good portion of those 29,017 career points came out of the pick-and-roll. Harden has been able to develop instant pick-and-roll chemistry with nearly every big he’s played with.
Atkinson credits this to Harden being in the 99th percentile in decision-making. He simply always makes the right play.
“He knows where the defense is in (on the pick-and-roll), he knows how to kick it out,” Atkinson said on Sunday. “When they’re out, he throws the lob. He knows the timing. And that’s rare in my experience to be around a player who’s almost perfect in terms of his decision-making.”
Evan Mobley may be the exception to this general rule for Harden. The duo hasn’t been able to replicate the success Harden has had with Jarrett Allen. That comes down to how both Mobley and Harden operate in the pick-and-roll.
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Mobley neither sets hard screens nor rolls hard. More often than not, he slips the screen before there’s real contact and then floats in the midrange and tries to find an angle to receive a dump off. That can work in some contexts — and has mostly paired well with an explosive downhill attacker like Donovan Mitchell — but it hasn’t with Harden.
Harden will always make the right play. But there isn’t a right play to come from this, given how deliberate Harden is in these actions. By the time he’s ready to take advantage of the opening, the defense has already recovered, nullifying the screen entirely.
This is why the starting offense has felt so static at times the last two games with Allen sidelined. Harden has still initiated the offense with the pick-and-roll with the big, but it hasn’t gone anywhere. Instead of getting things going to the basket and reacting from there, they end up wasting four or five seconds trying to set it up, and then have to resort to something different.
This issue isn’t that Mobley doesn’t know what he needs to do as the big with Harden, it’s just not his game.
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Mobley talked at practice on Saturday about needing to set harder screens and roll harder. It’s not that he hasn’t tried. He just hasn’t been effective in doing so.
This play is a good example of that. Mobley tries to set a solid screen on Harden’s defender, but doesn’t create much separation. He compounds this by not rolling to the basket as hard as he needs to, which led to Mobley getting cut off in the restricted area.
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Mobley is never going to be a physically imposing screener like Ivica Zubac. That isn’t changing overnight. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to make this duo more effective.
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“Evan is not used to rolling all the time,” Atkinson said. “I saw them talking tonight about screening angles. I think James can help him be better on the roll.”
This is an example of how Harden can do so.
Instead of being deliberate in waiting for the screen to materialize — like he did in the first example — Harden is more aggressive about getting around the screen quicker. This helps the contact that Mobley makes to be effective enough to get the defender on Harden’s back hip. And once that happens, there’s a mismatch he can use to generate open looks.
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Even though Mobley isn’t the prototypical Harden pick-and-roll partner, there are still ways to make it work.
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“I’ve talked to James about that,” Atkinson said. “Just getting those two together and talking to Evan about how he wants the screen angle, when he wants him to slip out, when he wants him to hold. And with Evan, he can mix in the pop (three-point shot) too.”
It can be easy to focus on what Mobley doesn’t do well, and understandably so. The flaws in his game, like this, can be quite clear. But that shouldn’t overshadow what he does well.
Mobley is a gifted scorer who’s continually added elements to his offensive game. He’s a more well-rounded offensive weapon than most bigs Harden has had success with. There’s something there that Harden can work with. They just need time to figure it out.
“I want them to get together and work on it more,” Atkinson said. “I think that could be a really lethal combination.”
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